The story of how Harry Longabaugh got his name is very ironic. He didn’t earn it by killing someone or pulling off a famous heist. Because he stole a horse, a gun, and a saddle from a cowboy near Sundance, Wyoming, he got it in Miles City, Montana, jail in 1887. After 18 months in jail, the man got a name that would last longer than him by more than 100 years. This is the kind of detail that is left out of blockbuster movies.
Before he became “the Sundance Kid,” Longabaugh was already a typical Western drifter. He was born in Pennsylvania and moved to the West when he was fifteen. He learned how to break horses in Colorado and worked on ranches from Montana to what is now Alberta. He wasn’t born into a life of crime. A lot of men on the frontier got into it slowly, like he did. It was somewhere between harsh winters and bad luck. During the harsh winter of 1886–1878, the N Bar N Ranch fired him. During times like these, many cowboys looked for less legal work.
When you look back at the record, it’s amazing how normal the early crimes were. rustling cattle. A horse that was stolen. For an outlaw, this is pretty small stuff. When he joins Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch, things really pick up speed. He starts robbing banks and trains and gets known as a fast gun, but he’s not the most violent member of the gang. Harvey Logan, also known as “Kid Curry,” held that honor. He left a body count that Longabaugh never looked at. Legend gives itself out in a way that seems almost unfair. Longabaugh became the more well-known person, but that doesn’t mean he was the more dangerous one.
The story stops being a Western when they get on the plane to South America and starts to feel more like a spy novel. Pinkerton detectives were after Cassidy and Longabaugh nonstop, so they took a ship to Buenos Aires in 1901 with Longabaugh’s friend Etta Place, whose real identity is still a mystery to historians. They bought a ranch in Cholila, which is in the Andes, and most people say they tried to change their ways for a while. That year, Butch wrote a letter in which he talks about “our little family of 3” taking care of sheep and cattle. It sounds very much like home. There’s a big difference between that letter and what these men were running away from.
It wasn’t peaceful for long. People began to suspect them after they went south. There was a bank robbery near the Strait of Magellan in 1905 that may or may not have been their work, a sympathetic sheriff who told the police before they were arrested, and a shootout in Chile that killed a police officer but wasn’t recorded in English-language history until a Chilean newspaper was digitized in 2022. That’s more than one hundred years between records. This makes me wonder how much of this story is still in files that no one has opened yet.
It looked like Etta Place had had enough by 1906. Longabaugh walked her back to San Francisco, and what happened to her afterward is one of those historical mysteries that hasn’t been fully solved. Cassidy and Longabaugh, on the other hand, were looking for legal work at a tin mine in Bolivia. They were hired as security guards to keep money safe from other criminals. That’s kind of darkly funny.
When the end came in November 1908 near San Vicente, it was small and not very exciting. A stolen mule with a well-known brand. A boarding house owner who seems sketchy. A message sent by telegraph to a group of horsemen. Most historians agree that Cassidy and Longabaugh died in the shootout that followed, but it was never clear who they were, which is why stories about them living have been around for so long. That’s the kind of vague ending that mythology loves.
Even after decades, it’s not really the thefts that people remember. The plot is about a ranch hand who turned into a wanted person and then almost became a rancher again for a short time. They were being chased across two continents by an agency that never quite let go. A lot of criminals came from the American West. Not many of them are remembered for the time they spent in jail.
